


Get Killed, Walk It Off

by Skarabrae_stone



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Fix-It, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 07:01:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14491404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skarabrae_stone/pseuds/Skarabrae_stone
Summary: If there's one thing Steve has learned, it's that when someone falls off a cliff, you should ALWAYS look for them. With that in mind, he persuades Peter Quill and the Guardians to search for Gamora, just in case.Contains spoilers for Infinity War.





	Get Killed, Walk It Off

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmilliaGryphon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilliaGryphon/gifts).



> Content warnings for grief, discussion of death, and graphic description of life-threatening injuries.  
> This is a fix-it, so although it's a little dark, it does have a happy ending.  
> Title is a quote from Age of Ultron.

“Do you really think it’s worth it?” Quill asks hoarsely. His eyes are red and puffy, and there are tear tracks in the grime on his cheeks. “I mean, she’s…” His voice breaks, and he rubs his face, roughly, like he can’t be bothered to find gentleness even in that simple gesture.

Steve steals a glance at Bucky, who is standing next to him, _alive_ , and tries to shut out all the ways he’s seen him die—or almost die—in the past seventy-odd years. He hasn’t let go of his hand since the dead—disappeared?—were brought back two hours ago. “In my experience, when someone—falls—it’s better to make sure,” he says gently. “At the very least, we should find out what happened.”

Quill nods, clearly trying to pull himself together. “Okay,” he says, as if convincing himself. “Okay.”

Footsteps echo down the hall, and T’Challa appears, looking as tired and careworn as everyone else. One of the Dora Milaje hovers at his elbow, and it feels wrong not to see Okoye there.

“Captain Rogers,” he says formally, then, coming closer, “Steve.”

“King T’Challa.” They don’t really need the formalities, not after the past two years, but Steve feels the need to cling to something, to anchor himself with the certainty that T’Challa is still the king, still in some semblance of control. He so dearly wants, for once in his life, not to be the person in command. “It’s good to see you—” _alive_. “Well.”

“I am alive,” says T’Challa, with his usual straightforwardness. “I am told you are going on another mission.”

Steve nods. “We’re hoping to retrieve Gamora. Unless you need me here…?”

“No,” T’Challa says. “Strange bought us enough time—we have a few days. But I have something for you.”

He unclips a pouch from his belt, and hands it to Steve. A glowing purple flower is nested inside.

Steve stares at it, then at T’Challa. “Is this…”

“The heart-shaped herb,” he confirms. “It has many healing properties, and under the right circumstances… it may bring a person back from the brink of death.” His eyes take a faraway look. “I have… experienced this myself. If the lady has any spark of life within her—she may yet be saved.”

Quill reaches out, as if to touch the plant, then pulls his hand away. “Why are—why are you giving me—us—this?”

T’Challa gives him a small, grim smile. “Because I can. Because it is the right thing to do.” He pauses, then adds in a more business-like tone, “There is a ritual you must perform, if the herb is to do its work. Nakia will go with you, to show you what to do. She will meet you at your ship.”

Steve nods, then lets go Bucky’s hand to give the Wakandan salute. “ _Wakanda Forever_ ,” he says in Xhosa, then adds in English. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome,” T’Challa replies, returning the salute. “All of you.” Then he steps forward, and pulls Steve, then Bucky, into a hug.

“Take care. Don’t get killed.”

Steve casts an accusing look at Bucky, who just sighs.

“I’ll do my best.”

 

Nakia is waiting for them at the Milano, along with the remaining Guardians and, to Steve’s surprise, Thor.

“Are all of you coming with us?” Steve asks.

“Of course,” says Drax.

Mantis and Rocket just nod, and Groot manages a soft, “I am Groot.”

“She was a brave lady,” says Thor. “I would see her brought home, and honored.”

He doesn’t say that he expects them to bring home a corpse for burial, but Steve knows he’s thinking it. Of all of them, Thor has perhaps lost the most; it’s understandable if he’s run out of optimism for the time being.

“Let’s go, then,” he says, and gestures to Quill. “Captain?”

Quill, for some reason, winces at the title, but leads the way onto the ship.

Steve and Bucky board last, squeezing into a seat that’s not really meant for two people. Steve doesn’t care; right now, he craves physical contact, needing to reassure himself that Bucky’s really here, that he’s not going to disappear again. Bucky must feel the same, because he curls half into Steve’s lap, resting his forehead against Steve’s collarbone.

Steve wraps his arms around him, not caring what anyone else might think of the sight. “Hey, Buck,” he whispers.

“Hey” Bucky mumbles.

Thor slumps down next to them, staring at the floor like he could burn a hole through it. In the right mood, he probably could.

“Hey,” says Steve, when the other man hasn’t said anything—or moved—for several minutes. “You okay?”

It’s a stupid question, but Thor doesn’t call him out on it. “Fine,” he says, and resumes floor-gazing.

Bucky raises his head slightly. “Steve, you idiot. Tell him to come here.” While Steve and Thor both stare at him, he flaps his arm in invitation. “Everything sucks, we’re all sad,” he says. “So come here.”

Thor moves closer, hesitantly, like he’s not really sure, and Bucky uses his metal hand to pull him the rest of the way over.

Thor and Bucky are both _heavy_ , and Thor is significantly bigger than Steve, but Steve doesn’t complain about the two of them huddling half-on, half-off his lap. They’ve all been through the wringer in the past few days, and he needs the comfort as much as they do. Thor has his arm around Bucky’s waist, and Bucky’s head is tucked into Steve’s shoulder, and Steve buries his face in Bucky’s hair and just _breathes._

At some point, there is a general shifting, and Steve ends up with Nakia tucked in between Thor and Bucky, and Drax leaning against Steve’s legs with Mantis’s head in his lap. He’s not even sure how they’re all managing to fit, but doesn’t question it. In the cockpit, Rocket and Quill handle the controls, with Groot sitting on the floor between them.

The journey takes two hours, and none of them speak.

 

They don’t talk on the hike to the foot of the cliff, either. Steve can’t think of anything worthwhile to say. Instead, he just tightens his grip on Bucky’s hand—whether to give or receive comfort, he doesn’t know—and tries hard not to think about what’s waiting for them. He doesn’t know if he can forgive himself if he’s gotten Quill’s hopes up, only to have them dashed again—but he knows he couldn’t forgive himself if they just left Gamora there, either. If all they can do is bring back her body, then he will at least make sure they do that.

As they near the cliffs, Bucky nudges him and points to a dark shape in the snow. “I see her.”

“Quill,” says Steve, and the others stop, looking startled at the sound of his voice.

Quill doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, misery written in every line of his face.

“Let me and Bucky take a look. If it’s… bad… you don’t want to see.”

“I’ve seen bodies before, Rogers,” says Quill, but he sounds tired rather than argumentative.

Steve shakes his head. “I know. But some things, no one should have to see.”

When nobody else says anything, he starts forward again, Bucky keeping pace easily. Nakia catches up on his other side, her face grim. The three of them have no emotional connection to Gamora, but that doesn’t make this easy.

She’s lying in a heap among the rocks and snow, limbs bent at unnatural angles. Blood matts her hair and soaks her clothes, and Steve has to take a moment before he kneels down and places a finger under her jaw.

There’s no pulse—but it’s cold here, there’s a possibility…

“If she’s enhanced, the cold would just put her in stasis,” Bucky says quietly. “The question is whether she died on impact.”

“We need to turn her over,” says Nakia. “I can do a scan, see if there’s—if there’s any hope.”

“Let’s put a stretcher down first,” Steve says. “We’ll need it either way.”

He doesn’t say _If she has spine injuries, we could make it worse._ He doesn’t say, _we are arranging a corpse for burial._

They can observe all the same things he does.

Bucky pulls the stretcher from his pack, unfolding it and lining it up with Gamora’s body. Together, the three of them carefully roll her over, onto the stretcher. She is stiff, and her jaw looks to be broken, her ribs caved in and her eyes open and sightless. Steve remembers teenage boys bleeding out in the trenches, and his hands do not shake.

“I’m starting the scan,” says Nakia, and waves a small, handheld device over the body. Blue light bathes the wounds and twisted limbs, and Steve reaches blindly for Bucky’s hand again. He doesn’t see how there can be any hope.

The scanner beeps, and Nakia makes a surprised sound, rocking back on her heels. “She’s alive,” she says disbelievingly. “I picked up-- the brain is still sending signals. They're very weak, but she is alive.”

“Can she— is it survivable? If we… if we thaw her out…”

“She would die instantly,” Nakia says. “Luckily, the ritual does not require her to be taken out of stasis.”

Bucky inhales sharply at the word, but his voice is steady. “How do you know this?”

“I have done this before.” Nakia meets his eyes. “You and T’Challa have something in common, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Bucky,” he corrects, apparently automatically. “It’s… safe, then? To tell Quill?”

“I don’t know if we can save her,” Nakia answers. “But we will try. I think… yes. Tell them to come here.”

Bucky gives Steve’s shoulder a quick squeeze, and heads back to the others.

Nakia turns to Steve. “We need to align the broken limbs, so they don’t heal incorrectly.”

He nods, face grim. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

 

At Nakia’s instruction, they cover Gamora’s body with snow, leaving only her head uncovered. Nakia teaches them the chant, going slowly until everyone can pronounce it properly.

“I don’t know if Bast will hear us here,” she tells them. “We are a long way from the home of the Black Panther. But I am one of her children, and Gamora has fought bravely in defense of the Earth, so there is hope.”

“She will hear,” says Thor, speaking for the first time since the Milano. “She is bound to you. She will hear.”

“Then let’s start,” she says, and begins to chant, pounding the flower to liquid with a mortar and pestle.

The others pick it up, too, Drax and Thor’s voices rich and booming, Rocket a thready rasp, Mantis high-pitched and uncertain. Groot, unable to pronounce the words, beats a rhythm with his hands, and Bucky’s rich baritone harmonizes effortlessly with the rest. Steve himself has never been much good at singing, but he can follow the beat of Groot’s—for lack of a better word—drumming, and he lets himself sink into the flow of the chant, pronouncing the unfamiliar words with all the energy and conviction he can muster.

Nakia pours the glowing liquid into Gamora’s open mouth and covers her face with snow.

The chant continues.

They wait.

 

_Darkness. Nothing but darkness, endless; no sound, no sensation. She floats, endlessly, without thinking, or attempting to do anything. Time does not pass in the boundless dark, but at some point, it occurs to her to wonder where she is, what she is doing here. Surely she has not always been here?  
There is an image of herself, as a something—legs and arms and a head—something other than a small spark of consciousness in the empty void. She explores this thought, curiously, dispassionately, but cannot quite make sense of it. _

_There is only nothingness here, and yet she is_ something _—why is she here? Is she the only one?_

_A light appears, like a pinprick in a black sheet, far away or perhaps just very small. It is golden and beautiful, and illuminates absolutely nothing in the surrounding darkness._

_Eventually, or perhaps immediately, she decides to approach it._

_In moving, she discovers that she has arms and legs, and that she can direct them easily. There is no surface on which to walk; she walks anyway._

_The light does not get bigger, or smaller; it simply exists, and she walks toward it, and the darkness remains unchanging around her. She can feel her body, the beat of her heart and expansion of her lungs, but she cannot see it. She has a feeling this should bother her, but it doesn’t._

_She walks._

_The light remains the same._

_She keeps walking, and nothing changes, nothing moves, until it does, and the light is all around her, and she is standing amid thigh-high grass on an endless plain. A black sky arches above her, full of stars, but the grassland is illuminated as though by a sun. She is warm, and she can feel wind on her face, in her hair._

_It occurs to her that this is the first time she has felt these things._

_Her body is green, clothed in some kind of armor, and it feels… comfortable, lived-in, and she feels a profound sense of relief. Whatever else is going on, this is her body, and it feels familiar._

_The grass rustles, parting, and a large black cat appears, coming to a halt in front of her. Its head is nearly level with her stomach._

_She feels, somehow, that it is rude to be taller than this creature, so she kneels instead, and waits to see what happens next._

_“You are far from home, child,” says the cat, and its voice is that of a woman’s._

_“I don’t know where I am,” she admits._

_“You are wandering.” The cat tilts her head, assessing her. “Gamora, they call you. They have called me, begging to return you to them. Yet you are not one of my children.”_

_Gamora feels tears sting her eyes, though she is not sure why. “I don’t think I belong to anyone.”_

_“And yet they call to you. Sister. Mother. Friend… Beloved.”_

_“Groot,” she says, the name heavy with familiarity on her tongue. “Peter.”_

_“They call to you,” the cat repeats. “Will you go to them?”_

_“I… don’t know.” She rubs her hands over her eyes. “I don’t know how.”_

_“You are nearly dead, Gamora,” says the cat. Her voice is gentle, soothing, as if she is telling a story to a child. “The last spark of life in you is fading. If you ask, I will take you, for I have been summoned, and no other god has claimed you.”_

_“And… the alternative?”_

_“I can send you back.” The cat sits, tail curling neatly around her feet. “Make no mistake, it will be no easy road. You will return to pain, and suffering. You may yet lose everything you’ve fought for.”_

_She considers this, remembering, now, Groot’s wide-eyed smile and Rocket singing while he tinkers with an engine; Drax shaking with laughter over some stupid joke, and Mantis clasping her hands together when she talks, and Nebula’s concentration when she fights. She remembers Peter’s arm around her waist, the warmth of his mouth on hers._

_It’s not a choice, not really; this is her family, and she will always choose them._

_“I want to go back to them,” she says quietly. “I want to live.”_

There’s a stifled cry, and Gamora’s body jerks once, twice, then goes still.

Quill flings himself to his knees, brushing the snow off Gamora’s face with quick, frantic strokes, and Gamora’s eyes flutter open.

“Gamora?” he whispers.

“Pete—Peter,” she mumbles, and her lids droop shut again, her body going limp.

Quill looks at Nakia, his eyes wide with terror. “Is she—will she be alright?”

Nakia consults the scanner. “There is still significant damage,” she says. “We need to get her to Shuri as soon as possible. But… yes. The herb has done its work. She will survive.”

Drax bursts into loud, raucous laughter, Mantis starts crying, and Rocket swears at the top of his lungs. Groot shouts, “I am GROOT!” over and over, while Quill just stands there with a look of shock on his face.

Steve himself feels giddy with relief, and he grabs Bucky and kisses him on the mouth before he can think better of it. He pulls back a moment later, grinning sheepishly, and Bucky smiles back.

“Hey,” he says over the commotion. “Let’s get her out of here. Thor, Drax… c’mon.”

Thor and Drax take the front of the stretcher, Steve and Bucky the back, and the rest crowd around them, still reeling with the day’s events.

“Thank you,” Quill tells Nakia fervently. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She smiles at him. “You’re welcome. But remember, this isn’t over. She has a long way to go before she recovers.”

“I know. I know, but… thank you. I thought…” He doesn’t finish, just hurries his step a little to keep pace with the stretcher.

 

Steve and Bucky visit them that night, once things are more settled. Gamora is awake, propped up on pillows and hooked up to an IV, and looks, all things considered, far better than could be expected. The other Guardians have taken over the recovery room, sitting around her bed and (in Groot’s case) sprawled on the floor. Steve can’t blame them; he still hasn’t let Bucky out of his sight for more than five minutes.

It’s only as Mantis lets them into the room that he realizes Gamora will have no idea who they are.

“Um, hi,” he says awkwardly. “I’m… uh, Steve Rogers, and this is Bucky Barnes, and we, uh… we just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Peter told me what you did,” she says in a raspy voice. “Thank you.”

“I couldn’t not,” he says honestly.

Bucky makes a disparaging noise and brushes past him to her bedside. “How are you feeling?” he asks. “’Cause I’ve tried the falling-off-of-cliffs thing, and let me tell you, it is definitely on my top ten of least favorite things to do.”

She cracks a smile at that. “I’m not dead, and I’m on a lot of painkillers, so. Not as bad as I could be.”

“I see you’ve got both your arms,” he notes. “So you’ve already done a better job of it than I did.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Steve can’t help but smile at the exchange, at Bucky’s courage in exposing his own painful past to help someone else. Then again, he wouldn’t have expected anything less.

“It’s late,” he says. “We’ll let you get some rest. I’m glad to see you’re… alright.”

“For a given definition of the word.” Her gaze slides from him to Bucky, and back again. “Really, thank you.”

“Of course,” says Steve, and Bucky follows him out.

In the hallway outside, he takes a deep breath, leaning his head against the cool stone wall.

Bucky frowns at him in concern. “You okay there, Steve?”

“I… yeah, I just…” He rubs his face, tired beyond belief. “When you fell, I—I didn’t check. I didn’t make sure. I guess I… I guess this feels a little bit like… payback, maybe. Fate. I don’t know.”

“Hey,” says Bucky softly. “Hey, look at me.”

Steve does, meeting those clear blue eyes, and finds nothing but love there.

“You did good, Stevie,” he murmurs. “You did good.”

Steve nods, unable to speak around the lump in his throat. He brushes a hand through Bucky’s dark hair, still matted with sweat and grime and who knows what else, anchoring himself in his presence. “Take me back to our room?” he asks quietly.

Bucky kisses his forehead, then his lips, and wraps his arm around his waist. “Yeah, baby. Come on, I’ll take you home.”


End file.
